Technical Field
The present invention relates to a toner, a toner housing unit, an image forming apparatus, and an image forming method.
Description of the Related Art
A toner set which is a combination of a black toner with three-color process toners, that is, a cyan toner, a magenta toner, a yellow toner, is typically used to form a full-color image by the electrophotographic method.
In forming an image of each color, light reflected from a document is irradiated on a photoconductor through a color separation filter or an image read by a scanner is written with a laser irradiation on a photoconductor to form an electrostatic latent image thereon. While an order of the toner images for forming the full-color image is not limited, in one example, an electrostatic yellow latent image is developed with a yellow toner to form a yellow toner image, and the yellow toner image is transferred onto a recording medium such as papers. Similarly, a magenta toner image, a cyan toner image and a black toner image are formed with a magenta toner, a cyan toner and a black toner, respectively and sequentially overlapped on the yellow toner image one above the other to form the full-color image.
However, as the electrophotographic full-color image forming apparatuses become widely used, their applications multifariously expand. For example, metallic images are demanded in addition to conventional color images.
To form metallic images having brightness like metals have, bright toner including metallic pigments in their binder resins are used, and the brightness is controlled by various methods.